Long-gone Blythedunes: Wrightsmans' Palm Beach house was demolished, replaced and later sold by Trump

Darrell Hofheinz @PBDN_hofheinz

Friday

Apr 26, 2019 at 1:39 PMMay 8, 2019 at 3:11 PM

The death a week ago of New York socialite and art collector Jayne Wrightsman at age 99 reminded us of Blythedunes, the long-gone Palm Beach house she and her late husband, Oklahoma oilman Charles Wrightsman, shared at 513 N. County Road.

The 6-acre property — with a different house — was later owned by President Donald Trump, years before he moved into the White House. In July 2008, during the real estate boom that preceded the Great Recession, Trump sold the estate to Russian fertilizer magnate Dmitry Rybolovlev for a recorded $95 million. That’s still the highest-dollar single-buyer deal in Palm Beach history.

The original estate had a house designed in 1917 by Miami architect H. Hastings Mundy for Robert Dun Douglass of Dun & Bradstreet fame. In 1930, the residence was remodeled and expanded by noted society architect Maurice Fatio for utility magnate Harrison Williams — at the time the richest man in the world — and his wife, Mona. Fatio changed the style from Italian to British Colonial and created a 25-by-50-foot living room.

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The Wrightsmans entered the picture in 1947, buying the house furnished for a reported $170,000 and then transforming it into a true Palm Beach showstopper.

As reported by social historian Augustus Mayhew in a 2011 Daily News article, Jayne Wrightsman “retained French decorator Stéphane Boudin to convert Blythedunes into a 17th- and 18th-century French showplace, complete with parquet de Versailles floors from the Palais Royal in Paris.” Later, decorator Henri Samuel stepped in and, even later, the New York and Paris firm of Denning & Fourcade.

Interior photographs in the collection of the Historical Society of Palm Beach County show colorful rooms with floral carpets, Chinese wallpaper, a variety of chandeliers and extensive woodwork, including deep moldings and French style boiserie. Furnishings included French antique chairs, settees and chaise lounges.

Jayne Wrightsman sold Blythedunes in 1985 — a year before her husband’s death — for $10 million to Leslie Wexner, then CEO of The Limited, property records show.

But before the estate sold, the Wrightsmans filed with the town a plan to subdivide the estate — with about 473 feet of oceanfront — into nine lots, although the subdivision was never implemented.

Wexner demolished Blythedunes and embarked on building his own showplace, but he reportedly left town after Palm Beach officials irked him by refusing to let him open a Limited on Worth Avenue.

Wexner sold the estate for $12.08 million to the late nursing-home mogul Abe Gosman. He completed the house but lost it, in 2004, in a bankruptcy auction to Trump, who paid $41.4 million for it. Trump carried out some renovations at the property before selling the house to Rybolovlev, who never lived there.

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In the summer of 2016, Rybolovlev won permission to raze the house and subdivide the property into three lots of about 2 acres each. Two of those — addressed as 515 and 535 N. County Road — have since sold for a combined $71.34 million, according to the prices recorded with the deeds. With 150 feet on the beach, the middle parcel, at 525 N. County Road, remains for sale, listed at $42 million and marketed by broker Lawrence Moens of Lawrence A. Moens Associates as "the finest oceanfront parcel in America."

Moens, by the way, handled the sales of the other two lots and acted for Trump in the 2008 deal opposite agent Carol Digges of Brown Harris Stevens.

And now two oceanfront mansions are rising on the lots that have already sold, including one on the south with television celebrity Dr. Mehmet Oz as a next-door neighbor.

Like so many other noteworthy Palm Beach houses that never earned landmark protection, Blythedunes today is only a memory. For those who visited the Wrightsman mansion, the memory may include examples from the couple’s renowned collection of fine art and French decorative arts. The Wrightsman Galleries at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art are named for them.

Mayhew noted in a 1984 House and Garden magazine article, which speculated that Blythedunes, with its security system worthy of the Met, “may well have sheltered more great works of art than any other house in the United States.”